BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, January 13, 2024
[Editor’s note: We proudly reprint below, unedited, with permission from CounterPunch, the lengthy article by CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair that brilliantly and tragically recounts the full range of U.S.-abetted genocidal horrors perpetrated by the Zionist regime of Israel on the Palestinian people. St. Clair’s exhaustive article includes coverage of the present South African government-initiated Genocide charges filed with the UN’s International Court of Justice against the Zionist entity, the present US/Zionist extension of the war against Gaza to Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen and Iraq, the genocidal complicity of the Biden administration and the world revulsion against the most intensive deadly war in the 21st Century, Jeff Mackler]
Tembeka Ngcukaitobi puts forward South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
After decades of forced evictions, mass killings, warrantless arrests, restricted travel, stolen land, demolished houses, poisoned wells, razed orchards, embargoes and targeted killings, Israel has finally been placed in the dock to answer charges of genocide against the ghettoized and bombarded people of Gaza. And it took the South Africans to do it.
South Africa’s team of lawyers fearlessly and calmly presented a meticulously documented, cogently argued and legally persuasive case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Led by Adila Hassim, South Africa’s lawyers argued that Israel has indeed waged its war “with the requisite specific intent … to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.”
Hassim told the Court that Israel has engaged in a “systematic pattern of conduct from which genocide can be inferred.” She said Israel has subjected the people of Gaza to “one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare…during which…Israel has killed an unparalleled and unprecedented number of civilians with the full knowledge of how many lives each bomb will take. The devastation is intended to and has laid waste to Gaza.”
Hassim argued the initial evacuation order issued by Israel on October 13, which called for more than a million Palestinians to flee their homes and hospitals, itself was a genocidal act. She concluded by saying: “All of these acts individually and collectively form a calculated pattern of conduct by Israel indicating a genocidal intent.”
Quoting UN officials, Irish attorney Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh aruging for South Africa, described Gaza as “a crisis of humanity,” a “living hell,” a “bloodbath,” and a “situation of utter, deepening, and unmatched horror where an entire population is besieged and under attack, denied access to the essentials of survival on a massive scale…Huge swaths of Gaza… are being wiped from the map…This is occurring in Gaza on a much more intensive scale [against] a besieged, trapped, terrified population that has nowhere safe to go.”
Attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi told the court: “The evidence for genocidal intent is not only chilling, it is also overwhelming and incontrovertible.” Ngcukaitobi went through the explicitly genocidal statements made by top Israeli leaders, cabinet ministers, and military officers.
He presented a video of Benjamin Netanyahu conjuring up the annihilation of the Amalekites (kill all men, women, infants and animals) and another of Israeli soldiers dancing and shouting out, “There are no uninvolved civilians,” and “May their village burn; may Gaza be erased.”
Ngcukaitobi told the court about “snuff videos” posted by IDF recruits on social media platforms like TikTok. He recounted a soldier boasting about the village he’d helped destroyed and about an Israeli pop singer proclaiming: “Gaza must be wiped out and destroyed with every Amalek seed. We simply must destroy all of Gaza and exterminate everyone who is there.”
Ngcukaitobi concluded by saying the genocidal intent of Israel was “not out on the fringes,” but “embodied in state policy.”
The South African jurist and former UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard told the court that the “prohibition against genocide is both a jus cogens norm (binding on all, without exceptions) and erga omnes partes (all 153 state parties to the Genocide Convention are obliged to enforce it).”
Dugard described numerous communications South Africa had with Israel regarding its concerns over genocide in Gaza and told the court that Israel’s response had been that South Africa’s propositions were not only factually wrong but “obscene.”
“What more evidence could be required?” Dugard asked the court. “It is precisely because of a situation of this kind affecting the international community as a whole” that the ICJ has jurisdiction.
It was left to Vaughan Lowe, a UK lawyer representing South Africa, to preempt Israel’s claims of that its atrocities in Gaza were committed in acts of self-defense: “If any military operation–no matter how carefully it’s carried out–is carried out pursuant to an intention to destroy a people, in whole or in part, it violates the Genocide Convention and it must stop…No matter how monstrous or appalling an attack or provocation, genocide is never a permitted response. Every use of force whether in self-defense or enforcing an occupation or policing operations must stay within the limits set by international law.”
Typically, Israeli President Isaac Herzog described South Africa’s presentation as “atrocious and preposterous.”
A provisional ruling from the court is expected by the end of January.
“Whatever the outcome,” said Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard. “We are witnessing an amazing moment of rule of international law history.”
Meanwhile, Avi Mayer, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, threatens to “exact a price” from South Africa.
+ On the 120th anniversary of the Herero revolt in southwest Africa, which Germany extinguished with genocidal methods it would reprise two decades later in Europe, the German government announced it was joining as a third party at the International Court of Justice, backing Israel and arguing that “there is no basis for the accusations.”
+ The Namibian government struck back, devastatingly…
+ Allison Kaplan Sommer, writing in Haaretz, about Israeli lawmaker Ofer Cassif, who endorsed South Africa’s genocide complaint at the ICJ: “In Israel, politicians are allowed to talk about genocide, only if they support it.”
+ South African President Cyril Ramaphosa: “As a people who once tasted the bitter fruits of dispossession, discrimination, racism and state-sponsored violence, we are clear that we will stand on the right side of history.”
+ Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy lashed back at Ramaphosa, calling the South African filing an ”absurd blood libel,” and accusing the country of providing “political and legal cover to the Hamas Rapist Regime.”
+ Meanwhile, Lior Hait, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, smeared South Africa as “the functioning legal arm of the Hamas terrorist organization.”
+ A world led by South Africa and Lula’s Brazil is a world better than the one we’re living in…
+++
+ A joint attack on Thursday night by the U.S. and Britain targeted 60 Houthi military targets across Houthi-controlled regions of Yemen. According to the Pentagon, Australia, Canada, The Netherlands and Bahrain, provided logistics, intelligence and other support.
+ No more hiding behind proxies, with missile strikes on Syria, Baghdad and Yemen Biden owns this widening Middle East war now.
+ The Biden admininstration said it holds Iran responsible for the role it has played in Houthi attacks against U.S. forces.
+ Later State Department spokesman Matthew Miller announced that the U.S. will impose additional sanctions on the “financial facilitators” of the Iran-backed Houthis.
+ Who needs John Bolton when you’ve got Biden and Blinken?
+ Yemen is one of the world’s poorest countries. The per capita GDP of Yemen is $707. It’s experiencing mass hunger, especially among its children. Crippled by US sanctions, it has yet to recover from a cholera epidemic that has infected more than a million people since 2016. It has been under near-constant bombardment by the US and Saudis since 2009. You’re the Man, Joe…
+ The Houthis didn’t kill anyone in their effort to stop the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Biden just killed numerous Houthis in an effort to allow Israel to keep killing Palestinians in Gaza. I hope this clears things up for CNN.
+ When the Saudis are urging restraint on the bombing of Yemen you know you’ve gone over the edge…
+ Biden vowed to restore American prestige in the world. But he’s been terrible at coalition building…
Gulf War Coalition-42 countries
Afghan War Coalition-61 countries
Iraq War Coalition–48 countries
Yemen War Coalition–10 countries
+ Shortly after news broke of the US/UK airstrikes on Yemen, Keir Starmer’s office sent this notice instructing Labour Members of Parliament not to comment on the legality of the bombings…
+ Sen. Joe Biden on congressional war powers in 1984: “The President does not have the authority to make war, he has the authority to conduct a war. A Commander in Chief does not initiate a war, he conducts a war.”
+ We’ve now been “one-off” bombing Yemen for nearly 15 years, which is what happens when no one challenges the constitutionality of the first “one-off” bombing (or any of the subsequent one-offs).
+ Right on schedule, it looks like more “one-off” bombings are in the offing: “President Joe Biden said he will take more action if necessary against the Houthi rebels, after the US military and its allies conducted strikes on more than a dozen targets in Yemen.” (Bloomberg News)
+ On the morning after the US/UK attack, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said that it had received a report of a maritime incident off the coast near Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.
+ Well, that worked. For the Houthis…
+ So, the US military has been exposed as an ineffectual security force for Maersk container ships carrying sweatshop-made shoes, knock-off Gucci handbags, yoga pants and other essentials of the American consumer economy through the Red Sea. We’ve reached that stage of capitalism.
+ When you were young
And your Tweets were an open book
You used to say live and let live…
(You know you did)
(You know you did)
(You know you did)
+ If the GOP wants to impeach Biden, then impeach him for starting another war without Congressional approval. Slam dunk violation of the Constitution. But you won’t, because you want Yemen to be bombed and you’d rather Biden’s fingerprints be on the shrapnel. Cowards.
+ When even the RAND Corp. refuses to have your back…
+ According to a US intelligence report in December, in the first three months of the war, Israel struck Gaza with more than 29,000 bombs. The US should know the exact figure since it turns out that the Biden administration secretly sent an Air Force team to Israel to provide intelligence for the targeting of airstrikes in Gaza. Over to you, South Africa.
+ South Africa’s lawyers have written to Biden warning that they intend to begin proceedings against his government for being complicit in ongoing international crimes carried out by Israel against the people of Palestine.
+ It’s enough to make me break out the Vuvuzela from World Cup 2010!
+ Greg Grandin: “They told us we were getting a 2nd FDR but it turns out we got a zombie Kissinger.”
+ Does the Hague have an air defense system? They may need one…
+ If a NATO member bombs another NATO member, what happens under Article V?
+ In new poll by Detroit News, only 17% of Michiganders say Biden deserves a new term. He trails Trump 47/39 in Michigan in the poll.
+ You know your campaign is in terminal mode when you face protests at nearly every stop from the very people whose votes put you in office.
+ LBJ didn’t even lose the New Hampshire primary and still dropped out, knowing that the war would ultimately drag him to defeat. Eugene McCarthy only garnered 42% of the vote in NH, which was enough for LBJ to call it quits, even though he had the entire Great Society program to run on. Biden doesn’t have anything like that to offer. But he’s also not as politically astute as LBJ was and much more vain. More vain than the man who named his own penis (Jumbo), you say? Yes. But Biden’s vanity has no basis in reality. He’s the village idiot who ended up in the cockpit (thanks to Obama). He has no political skills whatsoever as far as I can tell, except being a dutiful servant of the financial industry for 50 years, an easy sell for reelection after reelection in Delaware. LBJ, probably the craftiest politician–for better and often worse–of the 20th Century, still had a better shot at beating Nixon than the spineless HHH, who the great Robert Sherrill dubbed the Drugstore Liberal. But the war had gutted him, physically and psychologically. Deservedly so. He knew it and stood down to give someone else a shot. Biden shows none of this emotional strain or political insight. Largely because he’s a person devoid of empathy, especially for any casualties at his hands. He’s blindly walking right off the electoral cliff and taking his entire party down with him. Given the fact they’ve offered little resistance, they deserve the coming fall.
+++
+ Israel has been duplicating Syria’s blocking of essential medical equipment as part its collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Banned items include “oxygen cylinders, gas-powered generators, tents and medical kits used in delivering babies.”
+ Only five out of 24 planned humanitarian deliveries were carried out in northern Gaza in the first 11 days of 2024, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza said on Friday. The office said Israel was systematically denying it access to northern Gaza, including Gaza City, to deliver aid and asserted that Israel was failing to uphold international humanitarian law.
+ A secret assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency casts doubts about Israel’s prospects for success if it mounts a significant escalation against Hezbollah, saying IDF resources will be spread too thin given the war in Gaza.
+ Stephen Walt: “Why Gaza is such a problem for Biden: in 2020 a big advantage for Biden was the perception that he was a fundamentally decent person whereas Trump was clearly incompetent and cruel. But now Biden looks heartless or clueless (or both) and many see him as no better than Trump.”
+ In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Hezbollah sees “what’s happening in Gaza, they know we can copy and paste to Beirut.”
+ Jordan’s King Abdullah II said on Monday that Israel had created a whole generation of orphans in Gaza, where he said around over 30,000 people, mostly women and children, had been killed or were missing as a result of the conflict.
+ Zvi Bar’el: “In the view of the Arab states that are being asked to help implement the postwar solution, America is giving Israel a license to wage a permanent war that poses a growing threat to them.”
+ Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid urged uministers Benny Gantz, Gadi Eizenkot, and Gideon Saar to resign from Netanyahu’s government and war cabinet. Lapid: “The government is not capable of leading the country, and Netanyahu is not fit to lead the country.”
+ Udi Goren, the nephew of Tal Haimi, held by Hamas in Gaza, testified before a Knesset panel: “The thesis that military pressure will bring the abductees has failed miserably…you abandon them so they continue to be abused. When we return them, what will be returned?”
+++
+ According to Reuters, Israel is carrying out a torrent of lethal strikes in Syria targeting cargo trucks, infrastructure and people involved in the ship of Iranian weapons into the region.
+ Israeli officials told Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday that Israel won’t allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza if Hamas doesn’t agree to release more hostages.
+ This week Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a petition requesting that military authorities allow foreign journalists to freely enter Gaza, ruling journalists can only go in as military embeds.
+ Israel’s war on Gaza has produced more planet-warming gases than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in a year, causing “immense” impact on climate.” Nearly half the total CO2 emissions were down to US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.”
+ Bree Newsom Bass, anti-racism activist: “Biden is really trying to fend off criticism that he is racist, that he is sponsoring a genocide. And that criticism is completely well-founded, because…genocide is the most extreme form of racial violence that there is.”
+ You get the sense that Biden thinks of the Genocide Convention as, well, a convention where folks like him get together once a year to talk shop in Vegas or Reno.
+++
+ Ben Saul, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism and Morris Tidball-Binz, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, on the legality of Israel’s assassination drone strike in Beirut that killed Salah Al-Arouri and others: “Killings in foreign territory are arbitrary when they are not authorised under international law. Israel was not exercising self-defence because it presented no evidence that the victims were committing an armed attack on Israel from Lebanese territory.”
Saul and Tidball-Binz said that Israel failed to provide any legal justification for the strike and failed to report it to the Security Council, as required by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.
“Any legitimate legal justification for Israel’s military operations against Hamas in Gaza, in response to the 7 October attack on Israel emanating from Gaza, does not extend to authorising strikes in Lebanon or other countries. There is no legal basis for geographically unlimited attacks against members of an armed group wherever they are.”
+ Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati said his country has informed “all mediators that discussing a cease-fire only in Lebanon” without including Gaza “makes no sense.”
+ Elias Yousif, a Research Analyst with the Stimson Center’s Conventional Defense Program, on how Pres. Biden’s decision to expedite weapons shipments to Israel by bypassing Congressional oversight makes the US complicit in possible war crimes & genocide in Gaza…
“If Israel is indeed expending high explosive munitions in densely populated Gaza at such a rate that would necessitate emergency resupply, it should raise even graver humanitarian concerns. Human rights groups have already sounded alarm bells regarding the use of these very munitions in Gaza’s dense urban environment and their role in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Oxfam, for example, has produced research suggesting that, given Israel’s past employment of 155mm artillery, their use in the current conflict “would be virtually assured to be indiscriminate, unlawful, and devastating to civilians in Gaza.” More broadly, Israel’s pattern of use of all types of explosive weapons inside Gaza has devastated the small enclave, killed thousands of civilians, and severely inhibited humanitarian operations. Evidence that Israeli strikes are indiscriminate, are causing disproportionate harm to civilians and civilian objects, and may amount to war crimes or even genocide should all give pause to the administration’s desire to rush the transfer of these weapons.’
+ IDF soldiers failed to intervene as they stood and watched Israeli settlers kill several Palestinians in the West Bank village of Qusra, including Obada Saed Abu Srour, a 17-year-old boy, who was shot in the back. According to an account to the murders in the Washington Post, Srour, along with Muath Raed Odeh, 29, and Musab Abdel Halim Abu Rida, 20, were killed by Israeli settlers as they tried to protect a nearby house from being raided and destroyed by a mob of armed settlers. The IDF did nothing to stop the attack or detain the perpetrators. According to the UN, at least 314 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7, 2023.
+ Meanwhile, in the West Bank village of Beit Rima the Associated Press acquired security camera video showing Israeli forces shooting three Palestinian men, killing one, without any apparent provocation and when none of them “appeared to pose a threat.” One of the wounded “was shot a second time after he got up and tried to hop away.”
+ I’ve long argued that Israel bombs in the Occupied Territories, blowback against Jews living in the US. And a recent ADL report confirms this hypothesis. In the three months since the beginning of the war, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. have more than quadrupled compared with the same period a year earlier, according to data published by the ADL on Wednesday. These figures must be approached with some caution, however, since the ADL is now–apparently for the first time–counting pro-Palestinian rallies that do not feature overt hostility toward Jews in its count of antisemitic incidents.
+ New York City Councilman Robert Holden, a Democrat, calls the blocking of tunnels and bridges in protest of the war in Gaza “terrorism.” Will the next ones be hit with airstrikes?
+ Here’s a New York Port Authority police summons for one of the protestors: “Defendant stated in my presence: Free Palestine”
War is peace
Peace activists are terrorists
Fleeing bombs on your block is voluntary migration
South Africa is on trial
Genocide is a real estate development
+ An analysis by The Intercept shows that for every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned only once in the coverage of major newspapers they analyzed, while for each Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times — a rate 16 times more per death than that for Palestinians.
+ A investigation by CNN found that in the first two months of the war, at least 20 hospitals in northern Gaza were damaged or destroyed.
+ A January 8th Israeli airstrike on a Mèdecins Sans Frontières facility in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younas, where more than 100 people were sheltering, killed the five-year-old daughter of a MSF staff member and injured three other people.
+ Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), back in late November: ““Everybody everywhere [in Gaza] has dire health needs now because they’re starving, because they lack clean water, and [they’re] crowded together,Eventually, we will see more people dying from disease than… from the bombardment.”
+ Indiana University suspended Professor Abdulkader Sinno, tenured IU political science professor, for inviting Miko Peled, an Israeli critic of the war, to speak an event hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, for whom Sinno is faculty advisor.
+++
+ Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, giving a eulogy for a friend, Roi Rotenberg, who was killed in Gaza in 1956: “Today, let us not hurl accusations at the murderers. How can we argue with their hatred of us? For eight years they have been living in refugee camps of Gaza, while in front of their eyes we make our homes on the lands and villages where they and their forefathers lived.”
+ Dave Zirin in The Nation: It is to the shame of the sports page that Aaron Rodgers’ blather gets constant coverage while the IDF killing the Palestinian Olympic soccer coach and using Gaza’s Yarmouk stadium as an internment camp is met with silence.
+ British Foreign Secretary David Cameron testified at a hearing on Tuesday he was worried that Israel may have breached international law in Gaza. A day later walked this back after getting chastized by the Israeli ambassador.
+ The credibility of the NYT story about rapes by Hamas during the October 7th attacks continues to erode. The Instagram page of Raz Cohen one of the Times’ main sources in the “Screams Without Words” story makes no mention of rape in his post about that day. 
Then three days later, Cohen told NewsHour that “many girls” were raped. Finally, he the told New York Times that five men raped one woman. This comes on top of reports that the family Gal Abdush, a woman murdered during the Hamas attack and key figure in the Times story, that there is no proof she was raped and that reporters for the NYT interviewed them under false pretenses. Still no reappraisal of its reporting by the NYT.
+ Rape is so deeply enmeshed in Western culture that the tradition of “carrying a bride” across the threshold can be traced back to a Roman ritual reenacting the rape of the Sabine women.
+ Israeli MP Nissim Vaturi reiterated a statement he made last month that Gaza should be “burned”: “Gaza and its people must be burned, I have no pity for them…It is better to burn, to bring down buildings than for soldiers to be hurt.” Call them extremists, if you like, but the people making these genocidal boasts are members of the Israeli government and the Israeli government has been burning Gazans of all ages for 3 months–burnings the government shows no pity for, instead consistently blaming the victims for their own incineration.
+ Palestinian Authority President Mahmood Abbas told Blinken this week that “Gaza is an inseparable part of the Palestinian state, and we will not allow any attempt to uproot our people in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.”
+ Baghdad resident Sarah Jamal told the Washington Post: “It started in Syria, then Lebanon, then Iran, and now here. We’re being dragged into this, and we have no say.”
+ Iraq’s Prime Minister on the Baghdad strikes: “We stress our firm position in ending the existence of the international coalition after the justifications for its existence have ended.”
+ The United States still maintains a bloated military presence of 57,000 troops in the Middle East.
+++
+ As Anthony Blinken embarked on yet another tour of the region, publicly saying the Biden Administration opposed the forced resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza, Israel’s Communication Minister, Shlomo Karhi:
Karhi: We certainly need to encourage emigration, so that there’s as little pressure as possible inside the Gaza strip from people who, yes, at the moment, yes, they’re uninvolved, but they’re not exactly lovers of Israel and they educate their children to [embrace] terror. And we’d like to see, and we’ve talked about this in government meetings. By the way, there aren’t any countries that want to take them in. No one wants them, even if we pay a lot of money. Voluntary emigration is important. It doesn’t in any way harm human rights. And this war needs to continue. And when it continues…
Interviewer: So despite what we are hearing here [from Blinken] you’re saying we should encourage voluntary migration. That’s the solution?
Karhi: We should encourage voluntary migration and we should compel them until they say they want it…
Interviewer: How?
Karhi: The war does what it does.Interviewer: Meaning continue to pressure them using force, starvation, difficult conditions.
Karhi: Pressuring Hamas. Not difficult conditions. We do provide humanitarian aid to uninvolved people.
Interviewer: But the conditions are difficult there.
Karhi: Yes, difficult conditions. And they’ll continue to be difficult as long as we don’t bring back the hostages and as long as we haven’t defeated Hamas.
+ “Keep on crushin’ it”: How Mike Pompeo used to sign-off his State Department email, which pretty much describes the current state of US diplomacy.
+ The people who know Biden the best aren’t at all surprised at his affinity for Netanyahu, even though Netanyahu loathes Biden and, if still in power in the fall, will likely do everything in his power to see him defeated by Trump, DeSantis or Haley. Take Biden’s close friend and longtime aide, Ted Kaufman, who replaced Biden as senator for Delaware after Obama tapped Biden as his VP. According to Kaufman, Biden was drawn to Netanyahu because he grew up in Philadelphia, not far from Biden’s hometown of Scranton. “From the beginning, it was like meeting a kindred spirit,” Kaufman explained. “He’s had a very good relationship with Bibi for a long time. He talks our language.”
+ Speaking of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman’s clarification of his rant that “South Africa ought to sit this one out” because it is committing genocide against white farmers certainly clarifies his racism and stupidity, which is, of course, only to be expected from a Harvard man: “The entirety of my point was this: South Africa should instead focus on the spiraling humanitarian crises on its own continent–like Sudan where more than 7 million people have been displaced with widespread atrocities.”
+ Not surprisingly, Fetterman’s approval rating has collapsed with young people in Pennsylvania according to the latest Quinnipiac poll.
Under 35:
October: 40% favorable, 36% unfavorable (+4)
January: 28% favorable, 45% unfavorable (-17)
+ Walid Shahid: “The biggest failure of DC journalists was spending all fall asking Democrats to condemn statements of 19-year-old college activists rather than the official statements of Israeli cabinet ministers.”
+ Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he rejects the premise of South Africa’s case at the ICJ. This you, mate?
+ Yousef is a 17-year-old Palestinian boy who been swept up by Israeli security forces after October 7th and detained inside the children’s unit at Megidoo Prison in northern Israel, where he, and other juvenile detainees, were beaten by Israel prison guards and mauled by a guard dog. Yousef was one of the detainees released in November as part of the ceasefire agreement. He later told his story to Defense for Children International. Yousef said that on October 30, prison guards hung an Israeli flag in the cellblock of the Palestinian detainees. One of the Palestinian kids torn down the flag and burned it, prompting a crackdown by Israeli soldiers, who lined up the children in the prison yard and abused them for around two hours. Youseff told DCIP: “Around 18 children were severely beaten, screaming in pain. I saw police dogs attacking, bleeding from the mouth and head. They were thrown into solitary confinement cells outside the section. Guards raided all the rooms, kicking everyone out into the yard, beating them with sticks. The children were violently kicked, verbally assaulted, tied behind their backs with plastic cuffs, humiliated and dragged to the shower area.”
+ Emmanuel Todd, one of the last politically engaged French intellectuals, told a French television show that the best thing that could happen to Europe is the dissolution of the American empire: “Once the United States agrees to withdraw from their empire, from Eurasia and all these regions where they maintain conflicts… Contrary to what we think, we say ‘what will we become when the US no longer protects us?’ – we will be at peace! The best thing that could happen to Europe is the disappearance of the United States.”
+ Alex de Waal, author of Mass Starvation: the History and Future of Famine, on Gaza: “The rigor, scale and speed of the destruction of the structures necessary for survival, and enforcement of the siege, surpasses any other case of man-made famine in the last 75 years.”
+ But they’ll still have water, hospitals, sewage treatment plants, electricity, schools, places of worship, their children and the internet to post bullshit like this…
+ The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth confirms Israel used the so-called “Hannibal directive” on October 7th, which calls to kill Israeli hostages along with their captors. According to the paper:
“At midnight on October 7, the IDF ordered all of its combat units in practice to use the ‘Hannibal Directive’, although without clearly mentioning this explicit name. The order was to stop ‘at all costs’ any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, that is despite the fear that some of them have hostages.
It is estimated that about a thousand terrorists and infiltrators were killed in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza Strip. It is not clear at this time how many of the hostages were killed due to the activation of this command. In the week after the attack, soldiers of elite units checked about 70 vehicles that were left in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza Strip. These are vehicles that did not reach Gaza, because on the way they were shot by a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile or a tank, and at least in some cases everyone in the vehicle was killed.”
+ The IDF is investigating the possibility that an explosion that killed six of its soldiers in the Gaza Strip was caused by Israeli tank fire. The IDF has aerial footage of the blast, and now suspects the explosion was not caused by enemy fire.
+ A detailed investigation by the Intercept’s Sharif Abdel Kouddous into the killing of Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa last month revealed that after he was severely injured in an IDF bombing Israeli forces repeatedly blocked efforts by emergency crews to evacuate him, as he was bleeding to death.
+ Progressive Rabbi Sharon Brous, founder of the IKAR synagogue in Los Angeles: “Each of us, in our own way, has to find when we’re ready to step out of our shiva, and see that there is a world of human suffering that is happening just over the border.i think at some point, our own humanity is on the line. We Jews, who expect the world to see our pain, have a particular responsibility to see and understand Palestinian human suffering.”
+ Where we are on day 98 of the war: Israel is killing an average of 250 people a day, which far exceeds the daily death toll in any other conflict in the 21 Century, according to a new report from Oxfam. By comparison, the average daily deaths in other major conflicts since 2000 have been: 96.5 in Syria, 51.6 in Sudan, 50.8 in Iraq, 43.9 in Ukraine, 23.8 in Afghanistan and 15.8 in Yemen. Oxfam predicted this number is likely to rise because the survivors in Gaza remain at high risk due to hunger, diseases and cold. The report noted that mass starvation in Gaza is likely, in large part because Israel’s restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza means that only 10 percent of weekly food aid that is needed gets into the Strip. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch issued its leased its World Report 2024, which said civilians in Gaza have been “targeted, attacked, abused, and killed over the past year at a scale unprecedented in the recent history of Israel and Palestine”. At least 23,708 Palestinians have been killed and 60,005 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since October 7. At least 7000 more are missing under the rubble and presumed dead. On the day South Africa presented its case against Israeli genocide to the ICJ, Israeli forces carried out 10 mass killings in the Gaza Strip, causing 112 deaths and 194 injuries. The official death count in Gaza (23,708) is 8,000 more than 15,000 who were killed during the Nakba of 1948.
+ We paid for this…
+ Let’s give the last word this week to South African attorney Adila Hassim, standing before the ICJ and the world: “Israel has killed an unparalleled and unprecedented number of civilians. With the full knowledge of how many civilian lives each bomb will take. More than 1,800 Palestinian families in Gaza have lost multiple family members and hundreds of multi-generational families have been wiped out with no remaining survivors … This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life.”
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.
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